Episode 36: I Wish I Was A Banana Scientist

This week Graycen and Alison talk about bananas, the genes that influence sexual experiences, and bee brains! After the break they talk to Tom Rivas, a biochemist studying how herpes viruses hijack cellular machinery during infection. Listen here or subscribe on iTunes!

Alison learned about TR4, the fungus that’s menacing Cavendish bananas, from Jonathan Lambert’s piece for Nature. She learned even more from ProMusa, the internet hub for banana science. Whatisahectare.com is not a real website, but if you want to buy it for us and redirect it here, we’d be much obliged.

Andrea Ganna et al’s genome-wide association study on people who have or haven’t done same-sex boinking can be found at Science. This article by Nicole Karlis at Salon reports the science well and includes a lot of perspectives about why this study has some problems. One of those perspectives comes from Joe Vitti, who expands on it in this piece for the Broad Institute’s blog. Graycen also read this piece by the excellent Nsikan Akpan at PBS to get a feel for how this study was being covered in standard science media.

Alison read Ajayrama Kumaraswamy et al’s paper on the neuroscience of bees’ waggle dances at eNeuro. If you want learn more about bees, you come with us to visit our hive sometime! We need a lot of backup, apparently.